Our new paper on surface polaritons inducing LIPSS in thin films has been published online

Our paper titled “LIPSS on thin metallic films: New insights from multiplicity of laser-excited electromagnetic modes and efficiency of metal oxidation” has been published in Applied Surface Science (IF 4.4).

The paper explains the period of Laser-Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS) on thin Cr film, with accounting for the influence of the substrate. It also provides a convincing model of HSFL formation where the role of metal oxidation is dominant.

It can be downloaded here.

Selected outcomes of ERC Starting grant application

Calendar of the ERC Starting Grant 2018

  • October 17th 2018: ERC starting grant application “QLARINET” was submitted at the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter (Hamburg).
  • March 15th 2019: first notification of the status of the project were received.
  • April 17th 2019: evaluation reports were made available on the EU portal.
  • July 26th 2019: statistics and list of awarded applicants was published on the ERC portal.

Selected panel’s outcome

  • “The publication record of PI is very good, academic track includes also wide collaborations, research funding and continuous activity in working on challenging problems.”
  • “The driving idea of this proposal is new and courageous, when compared to current methods.”
  • “The objectives and the scientific approach are well detailed.”

Selected referees outcomes

  • “Both risk and gain are high, yet challenge is admirable”
  • “The approach is clearly compatible with research objectives and work packages, proceeding in rational order. Risk is high across entire work schedule.”
  • “The scientific approach is brief but clear and well-structured”
  • “This is a novel idea, taking a brave step forward compared to existing works”
  • “The outlined scientific approach is described in a very detailed manner, and the PI is competent to what he is proposing.”

Short answers to specific points

  • To what extent has the PI demonstrated the ability to conduct ground-breaking research? Very good | Very good | Very good
  • To what extent does the PI provide evidence of creative independent thinking? Very good | Very good | Very good
  • To what extent does the PI have the required scientific expertise and capacity to successfully execute the project? Very good | Excellent | Very good

Optional comments

  • “The PI has a very good publication record and he has set a very challenging goal for himself in this project.”
  • “A very satisfactory scientific and research track record with many publications, excellent collaborations, funding and research experience.”

Final mark

  • B (is of high quality but not sufficient to pass to Step 2 of the evaluation.)

ATLANTIC: CNRS-CELIA is leaving the Consortium for strategic reason.

Today, the ATLANTIC consortium got a bad surprise. One key beneficiary of the Marie Curie RISE project “ATLANTIC” learnt from their headquarters, linked with the French Ministry of Defense, that their right to participate into the ATLANTIC project was withdrawn. The ATLANTIC consortium will soon take decision on the way to mitigate the consequences of this “Force Majeure” case. All the secondments linked to the CNRS-CELIA will be rerouted and reaffected after negociation with Management Committee.

Seminar given at the Visegrad 4 management staff training, Brussels

Derrien-V4-Brussels-2019-03-PresentationOn this day of initially planned Brexit, the Visegrad 4 consortium organized a day of training on Marie Curie Actions in various representative houses of the EU commission.

In that occasion, T. Derrien was invited to provide a feedback from his experience with the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Actions on Individual Fellowship, and RISE program.

Final program of the training is available here.

How “QuantumLaP” was born?

Exchange rate CZK EUR - Oct 2013After a severe crack in exchange rate between EUR and CZK, national call on the research budget of Czech Republic had been canceled after organizing and concluding on the competition, expertise of institutions, and selections of research teams. As a result, a number of position had been canceled, including mine. However, my post-doc in Germany was already finishing.

The proof of the scandal is available in Czech language, here.

Separately, I had met with Dr. Heiko Appel in Berlin, whom advised me to write a Marie Curie individual fellowship to apply in his laboratory.

Kickoff for the Marie Curie RISE “ATLANTIC” project

The ATLANTIC project of the European Commission stands for developing an “Advanced theoretical network for modeling light matter interaction”.

Since March 1st 2019, the ATLANTIC project, which aims at developing an international network and regular exchanges between theoreticians of laser materials interaction all around the world, has started. The international consortium is composed of 11 countries including 6 members of the EU (Bulgaria, Ireland, Czech Republic, France, United Kingdoms and Germany) along with 5 non-EU countries (Japan, Russia, Bielorussia, Argentina and Uzbekistan) for a total of 13 participants. The Bulgarian group is coordinator of the project.

Purpose of the project is to exchange researchers (permanents, post-docs and PhD students) between teams that have been pioneering various methods of numerical modeling for the description of interaction of laser light with materials. The project is funded by the European Commission, under the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Actions, “Research and Innovation Staff Exchange” program, and comprises prestigious theoretical groups such as the groups of:

The project looks forward to ensuring highest standards in term of scientific quality, ethics and diplomacy in view of training future generations of scientists with the best human and scientific standards.

The consortium will meet at the New Bulgarian University (Sofia, Bulgaria) this week, for the project kickoff meeting.

A new website will be opened for the ATLANTIC project soon.

QLaRiNET: ERC starter submitted!

Today, I submitted my application for ERC starting grant! Of course, I won’t disclose the topic for now, but it is exciting to have applied !

If granted, I would get 2 PhD students and 2 post docs over 5 years. Finger crossed!

Going back to writing the pending publications.

Interviewed about Peer Review for an article in Undark Magazine

Undark Magazine Logo

Click on the picture to access the publication.

Outfalls of the Publons.com award has brought attention from an impressive freelance scientific journalist (Dalmeet Singh writes articles for most prestigious journals like Science, Nature, …) who kindly invited me to contribute to his article via giving an email interview about the peer review process. It resulted into a rich article that has been published in Undark Magazine, an american journal that is funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA).

The resulting article about peer-review can be found here.

[Award] T. Derrien received 2018 peer review “Publons” award “Top 1%”

Publons Award Top1% Derrien 2018

Publons Award Top1% Derrien 2018

T. Derrien was awarded with Publons.com award for “the top 1% of reviewers in each field who performed the most verified pre-publication peer reviews on Publons for the 2018 global Peer Review Awards.”

This emphasizes the high involvment of scientists into the evaluation process for increasing the quality of science. It also acknowledges the high curiosity and the altruistic qualities that are required for a peer-review process of quality.

On Publons.com website, the award is described as follows.

“The top 1% of reviewers in each of the 22 Essential Science Indicators (ESI) research fields. Rankings are calculated by number of verified pre-publication reviews performed and added to Publons between 1 September 2017 and 1 September 2018. Reviews were attributed to a ESI field based on the journal the review was performed for. We added a 23rd field, “Assorted”, to celebrate reviewers whose contributions were for the small amount of journals on Publons could not be directly matched to an ESI field.

We used the ESI field categorisation because these are broad research areas that align with the Web of Science — the most trusted citation index for scientific and scholarly research.”

More details here. 

 

After the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship

Application for permanent position

In early January 2018, I applied for a CNRS Junior Researcher position (Section 04/03: atoms, molecules, plasmonics) and reached the last stage of selection: oral presentations. Over 88 submitted applications, 33 people were interviewed. Only 10 people were kept in the priority list, where only 1 person got permanent position at CNRS.

Accepted MSCA RISE project proposal

In early 2018, I participed in drafting a RISE Marie Curie proposal named ATLANTIC. It has been selected for funding on June 18th. We are preparing the Grant Agreement phase. The project counts 13 partners in the world and an average budget of 950,000 € including 100,000 € for Hilase Centre for training young scientists in advanced theoretical modeling for laser-matter interaction. More details will be given when Grant Agreement will be signed.

Submitted a Czech proposal

In April 2018, we submitted jointly with Prof. Gurevich (RUB, Germany) and Dr. Yoann Levy (HiLASE Centre, Czech Republic) a joint DFG/GAČR proposal where both Prof. Gurevich and Dr. Derrien are principal investigators.

Accepted conference proceeding

In June 2018, a joint conference proceeding on the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons in lossy materials was accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: IOP conference series (IOP).

Accepted publication with Jena University

In July 2018, we submitted a joint research publication with Dr. Stephan Gräf from Jena University. This publication was promised in the MSCA QuantumLaP final report.
It is now accepted for publication in Materials, Impact factor 2.7.

Preparation of several publications

Several publications promised in the final report are under preparation. Stay tuned!

Future plans

Preparation of ERC starting grant is on the way.